Our Last Farewell to Fortunato Benedetti

    At 9 O’clock in the morning on July 11, our Fortunato was run over by a lorry at the crossroads near his house, and suffered fatal injuries.
    This is the dedication to him we read at his funeral in the presence of his family, party comrades and workmates. We wish to take this opportunity to reiterate our thanks to them all for being there and for their kind condolences.
 

Sadly we find ourselves here today to return our dear Fortunato back to the Earth he loved so much. Thirty years ago we were here to bury his older brother, Angelo, who also died under tragic circumstances, and twenty years ago we were here to say goodbye to comrade Silvio, who also left us far too prematurely.

Fortunato, as well as being a family man and a worker, was also a communist, which is why we are here today, party comrades for his entire life, to talk about him. He who has left us to mourn his passing.

To remember him we need not resort to the words of priests, or don strange attire. Communism, celebrating when there is reason to celebrate, and mourning when there is reason to mourn, has no need of such things because its has its own wise words, its own way of explaining man’s relation to his own kind, and to the world. Words, which for good or for ill, are comprehensive and, in a certain sense, definitive. Communism has its own response to this time honoured question; moreover one which isn’t just abstract and ideal because it ultimately converges in the practical question: so what should we do now? And here today, what should we think and what should we do now that Fortunato is no longer with us?

It is rather the present society of capital and the market which is lost for words, apart from hypocritical, useless nonsense, repeated ad infinitum. It is capitalist society which has nothing to tell us about mankind, about its past and future, because it has no future and nothing more to say.

Fortunato’s entire life was a reply to this question, an illustration of the stature and worth which a man of our social class can, and therefore should be able to, attain. Drawing on his long experience as a worker and on the secular tradition of communism, Fortunato, intelligent and always considerate to others, almost always knew the right thing to say and to do.

He came of peasant stock, and thus, when at great sacrifice to his family, Angelo went off to Pisa university, it devolved on Fortunato, the youngest, to go out to work: an agreed division of labour, and future, which did not signify a priority nor a lack of love and respect for them both.

His working life started in the naval dockyards and he soon became a skilled worker. He was passionate about his work, and soon there was little about the dockyards he didn’t know. At a certain point he also wanted us party comrades to know more about what he did, and he asked us to attend the launch of one of the ships he’d worked on, to appreciate its size and grace, to witness how proudly it stood with its prow aloft, and how neatly it entered the water. Then, standing on the framework of another ship still on its stanchion, he told us about the various phases of construction, drawing our attention also to the deficiencies in the dockyard’s safety equipment, particularly as regards the removal of welding fumes.

A few years later Fortunato would become seriously ill with a throat infection caused by those same fumes, an illness he faced with great determination and courage. Because he didn’t want to jump any queue we recall he only applied for an operation in his local hospital, and only at our insistence did he come to Florence to receive treatment.

But welding wasn’t the only thing Fortunato knew about. In his working life he had done a bit of everything, from growing flowers to fishing, and he always took an interest in what he was doing.. Later, when the shipyard was in crisis, he devoted himself to organising the cooperative which was formed and demonstrated his impressive organisational skills, good judgement and capacity to understand the needs of those he worked with. If a cooperative, on its own, and immersed in this mercantile society as it is, certainly isn’t communism, Fortunato’s commitment, and generous lack of self-interest, allowed us to catch a glimpse of how work might be carried out in a communist society; a society in which, put simply, each will give according to his ability and receive according to his need.

In politics, the young Fortunato had two masters; on the one side the shipyard and the daily requirements of the trade-union struggle, on the other, the teachings of his older brother who, as a student at Pisa, had been able to make contact with the party, which he had then immediately joined.

This was a time of great workers’ struggles whose momentum would overwhelm all threats and intimidation from the bosses, every murderous attack by their police on the factory and farm workers, and even the cordon sanitaire of the official trades unions, whose leaders had already gone over to the other side. Significant wage increases across all grades and categories, a general rejection of overtime were the demands that arose spontaneously from the workers, and the call would go up for a general strike of all categories to obtain those objectives.

Fortunato threw himself into the workers’ struggle in an instinctive way, and, incidentally, so would the majority of the young workers around him who couldn’t fail to be influenced by him. He would listen, talk to his workmates, take an active part in the meetings and then report back to Angelo. Angelo would let Florence know what was going on, who would draw up and duplicate a report, a pile of which would be sent back with the Lazzians. Forunato would then distribute them the next day at the dockyard gates, at crack of dawn, in time for the appearance of the first shift. And, as far as it is possible to do so in this society, the workers would win that battle, defeating the bosses and the State, and dragging a reluctant trade union behind them.

These memories are like a thread linking struggles of long ago to the difficulties and requirements of the present day struggle of workers and communists.

Those meetings and assemblies which Fortunato attended, in the dockyards and at the Viareggio Chamber of Labour, were heated ones indeed, and even when they refused to pass him the microphone, his powerful voice meant he still made himself heard. He was respected by everyone, his enemies as well, even though he never failed to call liars and traitors by their right name; they who hide behind the red flag only in order to betray the workers and take them, and their organisations, down the road to defeat and dispersal; they who call on the workers to make sacrifices, for the good of the workers, in the same way they persist in supporting criminal wars and murders, in the name of world peace.

When there came a partial decline in workers’ struggle, Fortunato, with his projects and sensible words, would manage to prevent some young comrades, moved by desperation and petty bourgeois impatience, from taking the terrorist road, a real dead end if ever there was one.

Fortunato was never behind the mass of the workers when they were wrong. This is because it isn’t the communist way to engage in cheap politics by gaining the merely contingent consensus of the majority. Fraternally he would point out to his workmates the trap they were being led into, and denounce those who were setting the trap.

The most recent, and maybe the worst, of these traps was when the unions proposed, and unfortunately managed to get approved at the meetings, different treatment for internal workers and those employed by external firms and for old and new employees. At the meetings, and writing in the party press, Fortunato, in his robust but precise language and mellifluous tones, declared that to accept these proposals would be disastrous for the entire working class, and cause a division which would compromise its capacity to organise for years to come. Today we can see the results of these proposals, with the struggles and consciousness of the working class now divided not only across different sectors, but even within the individual workplaces. With threats of sackings to blackmail them, and lack of solidarity amongst the older workers, young workers are being subjected to every kind of prevarication.

This was something which caused Fortunato much distress and he was right in predicting the consequences; that no-one would be able to defend themselves effectively – not even the older and more experienced workers, who today see their pensions being reduced whilst younger workers remain indifferent – once that a wedge had been driven between the proletarian generations, whilst the young workers are, and perceive themselves to be, class orphans, deprived of everything, and whose organisation in trade unions will today have to be rebuilt from scratch.

But Fortunato wasn’t just an organiser of trade union struggles, unstintingly would he pour his feelings, thoughts and energy into the party’s militant struggle for communism. In a communist, the two spheres, the political and the trade-unionist, come to together and overlap. He attended all the party meetings, and always gave his full attention to all aspects of party work, even to the most complex of the ongoing studies that are a fundamental part of those meetings.

In our party there are no intellectuals and no workers. Workers are just a product of capitalist society, like the slaves were in ancient society. In the same way there are no longer any slaves, so under communism there will no longer be workers. Anybody will be able to be a welder in the morning and, for example, a philosophy teacher in the afternoon, and on other days other things besides. Fortunato was an anticipation of that type of man, within the limits that living in this society allows, just as the party has to be the anticipation of human relations no longer based on competition and the commodification of work.

Today this man, loved by everybody here – indeed one who nobody who knew him could fail to love – is no longer with us; no longer here for his family, for his workmates and fellow party comrades. We miss him, physically miss him as thought we’d lost a hand or a foot.

And it wasn’t by chance, it wasn’t his destiny or fate which took him away from us. Once again it is capitalist society which must be held responsible; a society which in order to make room for the trafficking of its commodities inexorably draws away space from the life of men. We can see beyond coincidences and individual responsibility; it is capital which killed him, and it is capital, in its mad race to accumulate profits, which ran him down; after, that is, having enriched itself using his physical strength and intelligence for his entire life. It is the same capital we are forced to resist day in and day out, just in order to wrench from it the possibility of survival.

But Fortunato still survives. Not however in those fantastic worlds invented by the priests to console and delude the oppressed. He survives here, amongst us. It is us, with our will, who can keep him alive. Not only does he survive in his soundly built ships ploughing the waves. He survives in the memory of his dear compagna Marisa and in what he taught to his sons, Amadeo and Federico, who he loved more than anything else, and the memory of his sister Emiliana. He survives in the will, in the determination of his party comrades, we who we are proud to have had him amongst us, to carry on his battle for the liberation of the working class, to fight for communism.